Bug#760058: Will Ogre 1.8 remain in Jessie? (Was: The other packages)

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

(Please remember to copy the submitters of the bug reports in the future, the
BTS does not send e-mail automatically).


2014-10-25 12:21 Olek:
>Does anyone know if Ogre 1.8 will actually be removed from testing? If 
>so, something needs to be done with ember.

I do not plan to actively ask to remove it at this point, but it is not possible
to reply to your question with all certainty.

As a preamlbe: OGRE devs do not support older versions when they release a new
one (they never released 1.8.x after 1.9.0 was out, same for older versions at
least in the last 5 years).  They released 1.9 about a year ago, the last
release in the 1.8 series was "Ogre 1.8.1 [Byatis] released!  September 2nd,
2012".

I didn't even package 1.8.1 for Debian because the changes were not very
important for us, and I was completely sure that we would have migrated away
from 1.8 for Jessie.  At this point I don't even think that they will release
anything more for 1.9 either, if they didn't do so by now.

So as I said, I hoped to have only 1.9, but that doesn't seem possible now,
specially because there was no reaction from CEGUI (*) and another package just
started depending on ogre-1.8 days ago (gazebo).

But 1.8 already fails to compile in arm64 (which will probably be accepted as
new official port for Jessie), and should any other serious problem arise that
cannot be fixed easily, the Release Managers might decide that it's better to
remove it from testing/Jessie altogether.  Being unsupoported for 2 years before
the release ships and being a rather unimportant package in the big picture, I
am not inclined to spend huge amounts of time trying to keep it afloat for the
whole lifetime of Jessie.


(*) I think that, if somebody is interested, s/he should offer help to the
    maintainer, or request to adopt the package; because the package is awfully
    out of date.


>So what's the consensus from the Games Team (and from the people 
>working on Ogre)? Do we need to talk to the release team about this or 
>can ember remain in Jessie with Ogre 1.8?

For Ember in particular, well, it is a leaf package, popcon reports 30
installations, only 3 recently used.  I do not think that Ember has much to
offer to end users at this point, and power users or developers can install from
unstable or snapshots, or compile themselves if so they wish.

So I think that the risk of the two actions that you mention above, doing it one
way or the other, doesn't have much impact in the end.

I do not think that Release Managers are going to grant exceptions to this
package, though.  I would probably leave it as it is (seems the safer route),
hope that 1.8 is not removed during the freeze, and upload the latest upstream
to experimental supporting 1.9 at some point in the near future.


Cheers.
--
Manuel